1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing method and image processing apparatus suitable for a digital camera, and more particularly an image processing method and image processing apparatus suitable for JPEG processing in a digital camera.
2. Description of the Related Art
Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2000-312327 proposes an image processing apparatus, which can perform several spatial image processing, such as low-pass filtering (LPF) to eliminate high frequency components of image data before resizing image data, and resizing to magnify/reduce image data, and subsequent JPEG compression, as a directly connected process without writing the processing data in a frame memory. Concretely, several image processors are directly connected through a small capacity memory, and image data is input as a unit of block having a certain number of data in the direction of column, when data is input from a frame memory to an image processing unit.
Further, according to the method of the above Publication No. 2000-312327, for directly connecting image processors with a JPEG processor, and two buffer memories (double buffer) are provided between the image processors and JPEG processor, and the image data output from the image processors is input by the double buffer in the sequence suitable for JPEG processing, or for each Minimum Coded Unit (MCU).